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Hawaiian Legislature Hobbled By Computer Virus

While the key money committees of Hawaiian Legislature were beginning to crunch the numbers, a virus bumped in to its network causing some computers to completely stop working and slowing down the working of entire system.

Carol Taniguchi and Pat Mau-Shimizu - the Senate and House clerks, dispatched a "high-priority" memo to all of the 76 legislative offices and the Legislative Reference Bureau on March 22, 2007. The memo described the attack in detail.

Though the work of the Legislature is still going on and data is being preserved as usual, but the network isn't operating in a smooth manner, reads the memo.

The virus entered a computer server, which stored all the passwords legislators and their staff used, as per the computer technicians. Therefore, the resolution will involve a change in all passwords, reads the memo.

In a statement that Star Bulletin published on 24 March 2007, Mau-Shimizu divulged that the software designed for combating unsolicited emails started to register very high numbers of email with malware attached over the weekend.

She went on to say that they began from 300 emails, on an average, and crossed 37,000.

Senate President Colleen Hanabusa's office manager Nina Fisher said that it was the 1st incident that a virus could intrude into the system and stop the portions of the computer system of the Legislature, as published by Star Bulletin on 24 March 2007.

Computer technicians failed to make out whether the latest virus was a targeted attack or a random one. According to their speculation the virus broke in to the system either either when someone plugged-in a laptop that carried virus in to the system or simply accessed an a virus infected email.

However, the best thing about this attack was that it didn't compromise any data and no information was lost, as per Mau-Shimizu.

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